Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine

• hardened_malloc

  652 1,158 7.7 C

  Hardened allocator designed for modern systems. It has integration into Android's Bionic libc and can be used externally with musl and glibc as a dynamic library for use on other Linux-based platforms. It will gain more portability / integration over time.

  

Relevant copypasta:

Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality:

Data service:

The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts.

Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual credit card (VCC) like at privacy.com. It won't be linked to your name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are. There is also Abine Blur, and some others.

Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with crypto. You can also buy prepaid VCCs with crypto.

All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your choices. Defense in depth. Etc.

OS:

GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at all by default. You can make a secondary profile in which you install Google Play Services to set up an environment where you can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need that requires them. Unprivileged here means it's like any other app: if you don't give it access to your location, it won't know where you are. If you end the profile session when you leave, Play Services stops running and stops talking to Google.

CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that happen.

LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod, will work with many different phones. More privacy and control than stock Android.

There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e

Hardware:

CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL, 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run GrapheneOS.

You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If privacy and security and hacking are really important to you.

Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

• GmsCore

  429 7,013 9.5 Java

  Free implementation of Play Services

  

> is microG still a viable alternative to GApps or is there something else that’s taken its place?

microG is still viable afaik, but I prefer GrapheneOS's sandboxed google play approach since it's much more feature complete, and supports e.g. my 2fa hardware key, while that's currently missing from microG.

> The ROM community, especially those that cared about privacy, was quite small few years ago, especially for non-Pixel devices

Yeah Pixel devices are still the only ones you can expect to be supported by GrapheneOS and CalyxOS etc..., for anything else I think your best bet is to install LineageOS(formerly cyanogenmod) and microG if you can accept the current https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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